The most significant event in Tanzania in 2004 was the government’s decision in February to launch a $27.6 million project to draw water from Lake Victoria to supply hundreds of villages in the western Shinyanga region. The announcement that the contract for laying the pipeline had been awarded to a Chinese company brought an immediate protest from Egypt, which claimed that Tanzania was in breach of a 1929 treaty that had determined the distribution of the water that flowed from the lake to Egypt through the Nile River to be in perpetuity. On March 8 an emergency meeting took place in Uganda, where representatives gathered from 10 countries reliant upon Nile River water, and a majority of them agreed that the treaty should be updated.

On March 2 a meeting of the presidents of Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda to sign an agreement preparing the way for an East African customs union passed off more quietly. Tanzanian businessmen, however, were anxious that the proposals would favour Kenya, which already exported far more goods to Tanzania than it imported. The protection of Tanzania’s developing tea industry was a case in point; about 30% of the tea sold in Tanzania had been smuggled in from Kenya and Burundi.

On July 21 the Ubongo power station in Dar es Salaam, which was financed by the U.S. and created electricity from natural gas, began producing power. Nonetheless, the vast majority of the population still relied on firewood to produce heat, which had disastrous consequences for the country’s forests.

Despite rainfall in areas that had been affected by drought, there was little improvement in the overall availability of food, and it was estimated that 3.5 million people would require food aid by May. In February the IMF approved a loan of $4.2 million to assist the country’s poverty-reduction program, and on March 2 the Japanese government rescheduled a debt of some $115 million.

The nearly 400,000 officially registered refugees from Burundi, along with another 400,000 who were undocumented and living in refugee circumstances, continued to impose a heavy financial and administrative burden on the country. As a result, Pres. Benjamin William Mkapa held a number of meetings in August with other regional heads of state in an effort to achieve a settlement of the conflicts in Burundi.

There were problems too for the Civil Service Department. Although the government raised the salaries of civil servants in July, many of the recipients claimed that their incomes were still inadequate and denounced the huge gap between the salaries at the top and at the bottom of the pay scale.

On the island of Zanzibar, March proved to be a turbulent month. A spate of bombings and protests took place, but they suddenly died down. The police were unable to pinpoint the reason for the outburst or the culprit behind it; the Tanzanian government believed the violence to have been politically motivated, but the police were unable to rule out religious extremism. Zanzibar also attracted attention in April when the island’s parliament unanimously approved a bill outlawing homosexuality, with penalties of up to 25 years’ imprisonment for breach of the law.

Click anywhere inside the article to add text or insert superscripts, subscripts, and special characters.
You can also highlight a section and use the tools in this bar to modify existing content:

Add links to related Britannica articles!
You can double-click any word or highlight a word or phrase in the text below and then select an article from the search box.
Or, simply highlight a word or phrase in the article, then enter the article name or term you'd like to link to in the search box below, and select from the list of results.

Note: we do not allow links to external resources in editor.
Please click the Web sites link for this article to add citations for
external Web sites.